Chapter 1 - THE PRICE OF STEALING HIM
The roasting pan struck the kitchen floor with a sound like a gunshot.
It flipped from my hands, sending hot oil and gravy across the front of my dark-green dress before I crashed against the lower cabinets. Pain rushed through both legs so quickly that my body could not decide whether to scream, breathe or move.
I screamed anyway.
The laughter in the dining room continued.
For one confused second, I believed I had slipped. I had been wearing thick oven mitts and carrying the pan carefully because my mother-in-law had spent the entire afternoon warning me not to ruin her “perfect Carter Christmas.”
Then I remembered the force between my shoulder blades.
Vanessa had shoved me.
She crouched beside me in her fitted red dress, her lipstick curved into a small satisfied smile.
“That’s the price for stealing my brother from this family,” she whispered. “Next time, it’s your face.”
She planted one heel beside my hand, stepped across my legs and called toward the dining room.
“She dropped the roast!”
My mother-in-law, Patricia, did not even leave her chair.
“Typical,” she shouted. “She always has to make herself the victim.”
My name is Emily Carter. I was thirty-two years old, married to Daniel Carter for four years and lying on the marble kitchen floor while his entire family continued drinking wine in the next room.
Twenty minutes earlier, Patricia had sent Daniel to buy more champagne.
There were already six unopened bottles chilling beside the dining-room bar.
At the time, I thought she was creating another pointless errand so she could remind everyone that her son still obeyed her.
Now I understood.
They needed him out of the house.
I pressed both hands against the floor and tried to pull myself away from the overturned pan. My dress clung heavily to my legs. The pain sharpened with every movement, but the dining-room doorway was only twelve feet away.
No one came.
Frank Carter, Daniel’s father, appeared briefly at the doorway. He looked directly at me.
Then he lowered his eyes and returned to the table.
I dragged myself forward.
Oil and gravy streaked the marble behind me. When I finally reached the dining room, the conversation stopped. Candles burned between serving bowls. Crystal glasses surrounded the untouched place where Daniel should have been sitting.
Vanessa lifted her wine.
“Oh, look,” she said. “The martyr crawled in.”
Patricia remained at the head of the table.
“If you have enough strength to make a scene, you have enough strength to clean the kitchen.”
I reached into the front pocket of my beige apron.
Vanessa’s smile tightened when she saw my phone.
She thought I was calling Daniel.
She expected tears, accusations and another private argument in which his family would deny everything until he decided the truth was too inconvenient to believe.
I pressed the emergency-call button.
“No,” I said through clenched teeth. “This time everyone hears what you did.”
The pantry camera rotated slightly above the kitchen doorway. Its indicator light turned from white to red.
Patricia looked up.
The color left her face.
A dispatcher’s voice came through my speaker.
May you like
“Ma’am, stay where you are. The kitchen camera is still transmitting.”
Then someone began pounding on the locked front door.
